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The missing line that connects all the dots here is a beefy home video media server that transcodes & streams to all your uPnP / mobile-wireless devices, such as the PS3, Wii, XBox360, PSP, iPhone, wifi enabled phones, wifi Archos, laptops, etc.

ATI/AMD has dropped the ball. They tossed their home entertainment chip (Xileon - All-In-Wonder) group, so it doesn't appear they want in this space. They aborted the whole transcode deal after X1000. Is Hollywood (and possibly Cable co's) putting on the pressure?

Now if transcoding multiple streams by a media server with Nvidia cards make it easy to feed a whole house load of people / devices wirelessly (draft-n 2.0 with dual-band), imagine the next reaction for big media would be to squash it. They don't want people having huge collections of movies, be it in h.264, XVID, or WMV format on some multi-terabyte home server (there are some nice single purpose living-room jukebox multi-media players like TOMACRO or TVIX that can access wireless file-servers as well, or stand-alone DIVX DVD players with USB connectivity - to a external USB HDD e.g. cheap 500GB+ storage) which can pump video on demand out. It can then inch out into the SlingBox territory where you can serve out to the net; which TVersity, Orb, etc. others can do, but security and lock-down is for the more technically inclined.

The better the transcoder, the better the bit-rate per stream, and then if that target is reached, the transcoder PC can crunch out even more streams. Most media servers are so-so at the 480p level, much less acceptable quality at 720p or dare tread on 1080p content with decent frame rates; and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there. But what's to stop some indie service to blast Hulu and YouTube like sites with VOD services? Is NetFlix or ComCast or TimeWarner going to be able to put such powerful transcoder cards to task so they can bring real VOD library to the masses? The state of the art today for the consumer is rather toy-like, and I bet Hollywood would rather it stay that way.

Will this bring cable TV to a true a-la-carte vision were VOD servers rule the day where time schedules will end (TV Guides will be revamped to a library style navigation) and can serve up to any wireless device in your house through the STB / (future) hub? Send a upstream request for a PSP client to get a movie, and the cable company downstreams the best specific format; or a SD-TV in the bedroom via an XBox360 for junior, or the HD-TV in the livingroom, all crunched out by the big iron video servers behind the scenes at the cable co. home base using Nvidia cards (or maybe a few 9500Ms in SLI mode and optimized for CUDA to perform local transcode on the STB?) This second scenario is more likely, where control is under Hollywood's management.

If you were able to download raw TS off a DVR to a PC, the genie would be out of the bottle. Take the raw file, crunch to an acceptable compressed codec, then transcode as needed. Why showcase all your DVD boxes on a shelf? Just have a 2 TB+ SAN with a media server and a wireless-g/n gigabit router to serve all your wireless devices (and quite affordable if you know what you're doing but poor quality). The next step is to have complete transcodes done for your device to take with you on the go and out of wired/wireless range without a middleman approach of using a PC to manage the file drop to a media card. Just pick what you want to store locally on the PVP device instead of stream for later. Imagine that done 10x faster. Imagine 10x the amount of devices you can serve in the house. Your bedroom media hub, the living room media hub, the kids XBox360/PS3/Wii, the kids PSP, your Archos for the transmit commute, your iPhone (for those bathroom breaks - you wouldn't drive and watch your iPhone would you?), a laptop or two, an eeePC in the kitchen for streaming the Food Network, etc. Devices are getting smaller, mobile, and multi-function, yet there needs to be that mainstay PC to be the workhorse video transcoder. Reply

It doesn't mean 64 (it could mean 6-4, but it seems unlikely.) The Inquirer presented that idea initially, but they told us it's "Vyve" (that's my phoenetic way of saying "VIIV" in case some person tries to say it like the French "vive") and is probably more to do with the fact that it's one generation after Pentium 4. Plus, you've got the fact that VIIV sounds like alive. It's more likely to have something to do with Visualisation than the fact that it's 64-bit enabled.

The whole software situation for capturing and watching TV on a PC today is a disaster.

With my Radeon 8500DV, I can capture virtually lossless MPEG at 15Mbs and view TV without a home theater app taking over the whole screen. There is NOT ONE solution today that lists exactly what capture parameters (bitrate, GOP structure, etc.) can be set and NOT ONE which shows a lightweight viewing/capture app.

Nvidia cards have "VIVO" but there is no mention anywhere of the specs (hardware encode=??, bitrate=??, ADC= ?? bit) and no mention of software or even whether a WDM driver exists for encoding. Not one reviewer has touched it. Nice going Nvidia.

The Theater 550 cards have great hardware specs but don't come with any useable software. (The app from craig-tv.com might support it soon and that should help.)

ATI should take today's announcement and shove it where their software manager's heads are. It is useless to the very people who most need the solution.

By the way, Nvidia MUST charge for their decoder. A visible company like that would be sued bigtime for distributing a standalone MPEG encoder or decoder without paying MPLA the royalty. The deinterlacing IS revolutionary but it does not play 1080i at all for me in WMP10 and required an enormous amount of hacking to work with other apps (Moonlight-Elecard demuxer was needed).
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Having had the same exact GPU (AIW 8500DV, now modded with a 9800pro heatsink and running 320/300) I must say that while the intergration is nice, the ATi theater chip in that thing sucks in comparison to now. Picture is very grainy, and artifacts like mad on full screen...

Hm. I'm suprised that they didn't include chipset as a part of the deal... Reply

First, NV must PAY ROYALTIES for the decoder, but that does not mean they must CHARGE for it. When they advertise it as features of the card, a valid assumption would be that the price of the decoder is already included in the cost of the card. I think NV was able to pull a fast one with the PureVideo fiasco, and I hope that in the future they are more clear about what exactly you get with the video card and what exactly you must pay extra for.

Second, while I haven't had an NV card since my GF3 Ti200 @home, I will say that both my 9700pro and X800XL are nowhere near as stable as my GF3 was. In CoD, my 9700pro would crash frequently in a couple specific locations and in WoW my X800XL frequenly has screen corruption, fails to Alt-tab to the desktop (leaves the game, but doesn't make it back to the desktop and just sits there with a blank screen), and I get VPU recovery problems in WoW as well. Furthermore, in CAD work (specifically Pro/Engineer, which is not a very stable program itself) the ATI cards have many OpenGL driver problems. So, while the ATI drivers may be close in quality to NV's (and quite possibly better in some ways), in my experience they don't quite match up. However, in general the ATI offerings are "good enough" for home use.

Third, I really think that the video industry has a long way to go before any of these features become mainstream. I would really like to be able to plug an HD antenna into my computer somehow, and get local HD broadcasts that I could then record, but it seems like there is no real "product" for doing that. Maybe this ATI effort will give enough people hardware that the software will follow.

I am not real familar with the different codecs involved but why don't they allow you to capture and encode in H.264 instead of doing MPEG-2 capture and forcing a conversion? Is that just too CPU intensive? Reply

Didn't ATI already promiss this feature last time? When they launched the X800, they advertised accelerated encoding/decoding of MPEG1, 2, and 4; and right now all they've actually done is decode acceleration of 1 and 2, with no sort of encode acceleration to be seen. I'm really getting leery of all these video features that fail to materialize. Reply

That's not decode acceleration, that's simply a form of deblocking where the Divx codec doesn't deblock the video then passes it to the 9800 to deblock(and I use the term loosely because the Divx codec itself does a better job, IMHO). Reply

nvidia has really aggrivated me with their purevideo. they tout purevideo as a feature of their graphics cards, but in order to enable it, you have to pay them 20 dollars for their purevideo software. after paying 400 dollars for a graphics card, i expect the features listed for the graphics card to be included in drivers. i think anandtech and other hardware review sites need to be more explicit about how purevideo is only enabled after purchasing extra software from NVIDIA.

while I haven't been as impressed with ATI's video game performance as of late, WMV9 acceleration is included in their drivers all the way back to my 9800 Pro, a feature NVIDIA wasn't able to deliver with their AGP 6800 series cards, and only available after paying them for extra software on newer cards. Reply

I agree. That pissed me off when I found out about having to buy additional software. Maybe a 3rd party has come up with a way to enable the abilities of purevideo. Even better, for free. /crosses fingers Reply

ATI drivers work fine for games, ive never had one game fail to run on me through two Radeon cards(ill admit the drives for the Rage sucked as i couldnt get quite a few games to run on that thing)

I'm curious what Intels reaction to this since it treads into the same territory as Viiv, i think ATI should try to strategically place themselves together if they want Avivo to suceed to its full potential Reply

I've no more problems with Ati drivers than I do nvidias. Who gives a rat's sack about branding? Neither chipset is ever clearly and decisively the winner in the performance arena. Just pick one that suits you, and call off the holy war. :| Reply

There is absolutely nothing wrong with ATI's driver's, especially, since they started releasing monthly updates. When new games come out, nvidia has just as much trouble with drivers as ATI and updates are issued accordingly. Reply